My (sort of) ideal election result
Now I'm no longer constrained by having to fight for every vote the Lib Dems can get I thought I would have a bit of fun with a hypothetical election result.
My sort of ideal result* in 2015 would look like this:
Conservatives: 35%
Labour: 32.5%
Lib Dem: 12%
UKIP: 13%
Now before you all accuse me of going mad, allow me to explain.
One of my overriding ambitions in politics is to get electoral reform for Westminster. And a result like above would damn the current system in two different ways. Here is what the Electoral Calculus seat calculator predicts from the above national result:
Conservatives: 295 seats
Labour: 302 seats
Lib Dems: 25 seats
UKIP: 0 seats
Labour 24 seats short of an overall majority.
So despite the fact that the Tories would have got 2.5% more of the vote than Labour they would have 7 fewer seats than them and even with the Lib Dems would be unable to form a majority. This would massively highlight the iniquities of the current system. It would be very amusing to see how excruciating this would be for the Conservatives who are so viscerally opposed to any change in the electoral system being hoist by their own petard in this way. Also knowing that the elevated UKIP vote would certainly have split the vote more on the right than the left and also knowing that if AV had won (that the Tories did the most to ensure failed) would also have saved their skin.
The other major point and the reason why I wanted UKIP to poll higher than the Lib Dems is because immediately we see that despite getting 13% of the vote, UKIP get no seats whereas the Lib Dems on 12% get 25 seats. This is of course utterly preposterous and would again be evident for all to see.
One of the problems in trying to persuade people of the merits of electoral reform is that it is difficult to talk in terms of theory. People need to see concrete evidence of what we are talking about and to actually feel the democratic deficit of FPTP in action. Even then I am not convinced that a one off election result like this would be enough in and of itself to provoke a big enough backlash to trigger a change in the system.
But it would be a good and very entertaining start.
*If we can't get the weird quirks we see here then I would rather the Lib Dems did better than 12% as I think they deserve to. As it happens though what I have predicted here is not beyond the bounds of possibility if the economy continues to recover and UKIP maintain their polling levels and manage to get in on the pre-election leaders debate.
Posts
